The Labor Party assumed Kevin Rudd was administratively competent, but they voted him as leader because the press gallery loved him and couldn’t distinguish an administrative shambles from a hole in the ground.

Apparently there was an aurora display in Canberra in the late 1950s, soon after we moved into our new (parent-built) house in Ainslie, on a block of land where there would have been a dress circle view.

My parents assure me I saw it.

Sadly, one early childhood event that didn’t make it into my memory, even though so many others did.

Labor has formally asked the Australian federal police to investigate whether the job offer made on behalf of the attorney general, George Brandis, to the Human Rights Commission president, Gillian Triggs, was an inducement that constitutes “corrupt and unlawful conduct.”

Australia could have built a national telephone network in the 1920s but conservatives in power then didn’t feel like it. When the nation was under attack in the early 1940s, US advisers were appalled that the country didn’t have a national telephone network and lobbied Chifley and Menzies until they made it a bipartisan postwar priority.

The National Broadband Network could have been like that, but all Turnbull did was hand it to Telstra at the behest of Murdoch. A statesman would have stood up to the old bastard. Turnbull doesn’t understand upload and assumes internet consumption is as essentially passive as television.

I’ll remember this whenever I come across someone who’s adamant that Turnbull will be the NBN’s saviour.

My father died in June 2002, about 8:30 pm, and that night my daughter and I returned to the farm about 11:00 pm where there is no artificial light visible, and on a freezing but clear night there was the most prominent southern Aurora I have ever seen, pulsing up to about one third of the night sky. We were both amazed to not see in the news some mention/film of it over the next day or so.